re: Are we in a dead period of new tech?

def not.

VR has been progressing along at a very nice pace as well as AR and It's insane what's available on the maker side of things with available chips, processors, and microcontrollers. You can literally roll your own encrypted mesh network with off the shelf parts at about $30 a unit. With 3d printing you can even prototype your own stuff now or utilize open source projects. Barrier to entry is insanely low. I guess if you're just a moron buying a phone every year I can see how you'd think that but even the latest phones can lidar scan an entire room and map it's dimensions and give you enough data to rebuild it entirely virtually with high accuracy. People don't realize how much tech is crammed into current release phones, they just think the camera is slightly improved. Under the hood it's nuts what these devices are doing, just the image processing along for the camera is crazy advanced.

I think the perception of a plateau in tech is kind of funny when you think about it.

OP mentioned smartphones and wearables - it’s been less than 20 years since the first iPhone launched and 10 years since the first Apple Watch. Also it might feel like “minor performance improvements” in these devices every year but if you compare a 1st generation iPhone to the iPhone 17 Pro there’s a massive difference. The 1st gen had a 412 MHz CPU while the 17 Pro has a 6-core 4.26 GHz CPU, as an example. It’s something like a 46x increase in total clock speed * cores over <20 years.

I think the issue with consumer electronics is that while the underlying tech continues to improve, we aren’t seeing as many revolutionary applications of the tech as we saw from say 2005-2015.

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Things like TVs and monitors might be reaching their max performance capabilities.

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I’m not sure about this. You can get an 8k 120 Hz HDR TV today for the price of a 1080p 60 Hz TV 10-15 years ago. OLED panels are common today while they were a novelty about a decade ago. The big limiting factor with TV’s, particularly when it comes to resolution, is content availability.

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Neuralink is doing incredible things and kind of operating in the background.

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I don't think this is something that your every day consumer will use though

It's more for medical applications

Was merging onto the highway a couple days ago. My car freaked out and steered me back into the on ramp. For a split second I was thinking WTF.

A work van had cut across 2 lanes of traffic and into my blind spot to make his exit.

Continuing my 30+ years of no wrecks thanks to Tesla.

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I was promised hoverboards and flying cars

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LINK

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Sort of what I'm getting at. I think we're nearing the technical maximums of what can be expected out of the current gen tech.

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I’m saying that I don’t think this is what’s happening. I don’t think the technical maximums are the issue. Smartphone tech specs are still improving, although there is the problem of battery energy density as someone else noted.

But there’s a bigger issue holding back consumer electronics. Let’s say your smartphone was driven by a quantum computer. What would you do with it that you aren’t doing today? At some point the extra technical capability doesn’t help you play Candy Crush.

The iPhone wasn’t revolutionary because of tech specs. It was revolutionary because Apple/Jobs had the foresight to see that the phone on your pocket could be more than just a phone. But now we are running out of other stuff to do with our phones. You excluded AI from the conversation, but I think that’s the obvious answer for the next big smartphone capability - AI models run locally on smartphones in the background to accomplish any number of personal assistant-type tasks.

Beyond that, I think AR is the future of bleeding-edge consumer tech. But I can’t help but wonder whether we somewhat skip over the “wearable” phase of AR and go straight to direct integration (e.g. Neuralink). That prospect is either exciting or dystopian depending how you choose to look at it.

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No one can see in 8K though anyway. 4K is about the max resolution that is useful for our abilities. And for some people you might not be able to tell much difference between 1080 and 4K anyway.

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This depends entirely on the size of the display (both physically and relative to the viewer’s FOV). Another factor specific to TV/movies is that there are often intentional artistic decisions made during filming and production that reduce the benefits of higher resolution. So generally I’d say higher resolutions make more difference in gaming and productivity than TV. But yes - I’d mostly agree that the benefits of 8K over 4K for most people would still be limited, even if there was plenty of 8K content available.

Still.. panel costs for a given set of specs are falling constantly which is an improvement in itself.